


Kairi in the Final World

by Pupplez



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Temporary Character Death, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Crying, During Canon, Emotional, F/M, KH3 spoilers, Kingdom Hearts 3 spoilers, Mid-Canon, Never gonna read this again, Not Really Character Death, Run-On Sentences, Spoilers, Temporary Character Death, The Final World, kind of they're already dead, not specifically lol, queerplatonic kairi/sora, spoilers in tags, unedited, vent - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 15:40:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19833277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pupplez/pseuds/Pupplez
Summary: Kairi's time in the Final World with Chirithy





	Kairi in the Final World

“two in one day?” the creature says. “huh. Well, welcome”  
Kairi looks around. “Where ... are we?”  
“This is the Final World. The place for those whose hearts and bodies perish together.”  
Kairi sits down.   
“But since you’re here, something is keeping you tethered to the mortal world.”  
Kairi looks up sharply. “Can I go back?”  
The cat-thing looks her up and down. “That depends.”  
Kairi pulls her knees under her and leans toward the creature. “On what?” she asks, eager now.   
“On what’s holding you back, and on you. It’ll be very hard. . you don’t seem to be retaining much form. If your body was cast into this world with your heart, it’s very scattered. It’ll take a lot of work to gather yourself up again. It might be impossible. I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”  
Kairi falls back on her heels. Her eyes well up, and she gives in and drops her head to cry.  
The creature comes closer. “I know it can be hard to process...”  
“What’s your name?” kairi asks, looking over.  
“I’m Chirithy.”  
“I’m Kairi. I’m glad you’re here.” She smiles weakly. “Chirithy, something doesn’t feel right.” She looks down at her hands. “I’m disappearing. What does that mean?” She raises her eyes to meet Chirithy’s.  
Chirithy shakes their head. “Your ties are breaking.”  
“Why?!”  
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”  
“Wait. Before my body’s gone.. do you want to see my friends?” She pulls out her gummiphone and opens up her camera roll. The first few pictures are selfies of her making faces at Xehanort’s back. She reaches the first picture of Sora. He’s grinning so big that his eyes are just fallen parentheses, palm trees stand strong behind him, and he’s blushing profusely. She wants to laugh at his face and smile at the memory of that day and cry at the idea of losing this forever. She turns the phone to chirithy.   
“Whoa! He’s the one who was here earlier!”  
“Huh?”  
“It was you, wasn’t it? You kept him from fading away. I bet he’s holding onto you too. What’s going on out there?”  
Kairi tells them about Xehanort, and Kingdom Hearts, and the war.   
“I’m sorry to hear that. I was in a war once too. Actually, pretty similar to what you describe. But there were more keybladers fighting.”  
“I just wanted it to be over. I.. The last two years... My two friends, Riku and Sora, they kept going off to do Important World Saving things, and leaving me behind. Every time I found them, they got dragged away again. I finally trained so that at least this time I could be dragged with them. But I’m worried.. that while I was training... Maybe I wasted time that I could have spent with them. I thought that once we got rid of Xehanort, we could go back home, and be together again. But-” She takes a shaky breath. “But I don’t even know if they’ll defeat him. I don’t know if they even took out the Organization, or if they saved Terra, or if the rest of the guardians of light are even alive still. I feel so helpless. What if they don’t beat Xehanort and he summons Kingdom Hearts? What if they died and he went after the Princesses of Heart instead? What if all the worlds are gone? I just want one day without worrying about the fate of the universe, without Heartless, without anything but the sea and the sky and the sand.” Her eyes and voice harden as she continues, “I guess it’s my fault for having such selfish thoughts. how could I even dream of being free from the responsibility of the keyblade.” She shakes her head. “Stupid. Even if we did beat xehanort this time, there’d probably just be more heartless on our doorstep the next morning.” Her voice begins to rise. “Yen Sid would send them off on some new important journey regarding a huge problem that’s been simmering for decades that we’ve never heard about and I’d get tossed to the wayside again, just like always, and I’d pretend to be okay with it, and wish them luck, and watch them leave, and then spend months on end watching the sky, waiting for them to come back, wondering if they’re even still ALIVE” Her voice raw and cracking, her form almost nothing, she breaks into sobs. “STUPID RAFT” she screams.   
After what seems like hours, she’s calm enough to think again. “I’m sorry, Chirithy. You probably have to deal with this a lot, huh?”  
Chirithy shrugs. “I guess. I’ve kind of gotten used to it though. Sounds like you’ve had a pretty rough time, huh?”  
“Really, it wasn’t so bad. . . Well. It’s only been the last, what? Three years? That this has been going on... And I know it’s important, and that if I’d gone along I’d have been more of a burden than anything. It’s just.. It felt like they weren’t thinking about me. Not that they were thinking of themselves instead, it’s just that they got so caught up in saving people, strangers, that they didn’t even consider the fact that I was on the Islands, alone, and worrying about them constantly. They could’ve visited, or somehow at least let me know they were alive. I don’t blame them, though. They told me some of their stories, and although I’m sure they censored quite a bit of the peril from their adventures, they had to have been pretty focused. Oh my gosh. I’m jealous, aren’t I? Am I being a Jealous Girlfriend?! Ugh, I can’t stand myself sometimes.”  
Chirithy watches this argument with bemusement. Then they gasp. “Uh, Kairi, you’re--”  
Kairi loses her balance as her point of view shoots up a few feet. Looking down, she ca see that her form is back.   
“is this normal?” she asks  
“Never seen it before. Everyone else has always stayed a star once their bodies faded.”  
Kairi is feeling her face and belly and arms in confusion when a loud noise startles them both. They turn around to look for the source just in time to be nearly blinded by a flash of light.   
When they lower their arms and blink away the light, they see another boy doing the same.   
After a speechless moment, Kairi’s voice cracks as she says, “Sora?”  
Tears stream down the boy’s face as he runs to Kairi and hugs her fiercely.  
She can’t manage to say anything other than “Sora,” as she begins to cry with him. She wraps her arms tightly around his torso, grasping the fabric of his jacket to feel the realness of it.   
“I’m sorry,” Sora whispers through tears. “I’m sorry for everything.”  
Kairi clutches the fabric tighter.   
“Kairi...”  
He pulls away after about ten years, which can’t ever be long enough to hold the best thing in the worlds, and keeps his hands on her arms as she wipes her tears away to drink in his face.   
“I’m going to bring you home. This never should have happened. All I wanted, all I was ever trying to do, was to keep you safe. I don’t know where I went wrong, but I guess somewhere along the line I started thinking that keeping you safe meant keeping you in one place, away from me. I tried to put our life on hold while I did the things that seemed so urgent. I thought once I beat all the monsters and saved all the worlds I could come back and we could pick up right where we left. I was only thinking of myself.” He takes one of his hands off of her to wipe his eyes. “Even today, when Xemnas took you, I thought I had to help the others before I could do anything. I shouldn’t have waited so long to try to find you. The others would have been fine if I’d taken the time to find Xemnas and --”  
Kairi backs out of his grasp. “Sora for ansem’s sake, I’m not MAD at you! I couldn’t be mad at you! When have you ever been anything but entirely selfless? How can you blame yourself?” she shouts. “I couldn’t be mad at you,” she repeats, crumpling to the ground.  
Sora kneels in front of her. “What’s wrong, then?”  
She looks up at him for a minute, then laughs incredulously. “I’m DEAD, sora.”  
“Well, besides that.”  
Kairi shakes her head. “Why are you here?”  
“Kairi. . . “  
“Why didn’t you just leave me up here to wait for you to remember me? Why didn’t you go check on all the worlds to make sure they were safe and heartless-free before coming to deathland to check on your best friend? Wasn’t there some new, pressing danger to obliterate before you could think about patient little kairi, who’ll wait forever for you to remember that she darking exists? Did it cross your mind to just let me wait here until you die too, so we can be together again, in freaking HEAVEN?”  
“KAIRI YOU’RE EVERYTHING TO ME!”  
She falls silent again, wide- and teary-eyed.   
“Do you know how much it hurts every time i watch you slip away? Do you know how broken I felt when I saw you in Xehanort’s clutches? Do you know how my heart ripped in two as I watched his blade coming toward you? Do you know how hard it was to get back up and finish the fight after you disappeared? Knowing that even if we won it wouldn’t matter because the only reason I was fighting was broken forever and wouldn’t ever come back? Do you know that the only reason I left you so often was so that one day we could be carefree again, together, on the islands? That the only thing that kept me going was the thought of the three of us laying on the beach again? You’re all I ever wanted, Kairi. I’d do anything for you.”  
They don’t talk for a minute.  
“Sora, I don’t want to lose you,” she whispers.  
He pulls her back into another hug. “I can’t lose you,” he murmurs.   
“Merlin told us that you were trying to learn the Power of Waking, so I read up on it a bit... Sora I don’t think you’re supposed to use it like this. If you take me back, you might...”  
“Shhhhh,” he soothes, moving a hand to her head. “Do you remember, back when you lost your heart? I gave up mine to free yours. It was the easiest choice in the world-- the only choice in the world.” He pulls back to look in her eyes. “Kairi, if there was a possibility that I could do something to save you, and I didn’t do it, I’d regret it every day for the rest of my life. There isn’t a version of me, of my life, where I would leave you alone here and go on living without you if there’s a single chance to save you. Do you understand that?” He wipes a tear off her cheek with his thumb, and leaves his hand there.   
Finally, she shakes her head and smiles, like, “you’ll never learn”. “There you go again. Just thinking about yourself.” Her expression turns serious. “Sora, I’ll find you. No matter what it takes.”  
“Kairi d--”  
“I promise.” She stares at him challengingly for a minute and neither of them breathe.  
Finally Sora sighs, lowering his head. “Well now you have no choice.” He stands up, then reaches for her hand. He pulls her to her feet, then meets her gaze. “I’ll be waiting.” He slips something into her hand. “While you’re at it, keep this safe for me, will you?” he smiles. “Remember, I’m always with you.”  
Suddenly they’re sitting on the paopu tree where they used to sit every day, and where, it seemed like so long ago, they had shared the paopu fruit and linked their destinies. The sun was setting now, and for a moment it seemed like none of the past years had happened, and they were just sitting together as they’d done so often, watching the sun sink below the horizon. But then Sora squeezes Kairi’s hand, and when she takes her eyes away from the sky, riku isn’t standing next to them, and as she looks over to sora, he’s smiling at her steadily, though his eyes are sad. She manages to return the smile but can’t keep the tear from trailing down her face. They gaze at eachother for eternity, until a few seconds later, her universe vanishes in before her eyes.   
Keep this safe for me, he’d said. She lifts her hand to see what he’d given her. For a moment she thinks it’s the ‘lucky charm’ she’d first given him so long ago and she wants to run after him and shove it back into his pocket, or scream at him for implying that his promises have been kept. But she keeps looking at it as tears build and spill out as she notices the imperfect shells and uneven threads. As she turns it over and sees the red coloring on the top shell. The star shaped charm in the center. She clutches it to her chest and slides to the ground, sobbing openly now. Sora made her a wayfinder.


End file.
